Stress Dependence of Sandstone Electrical

Properties and Deviations From Archie’s Law

T he resistivity index (RI) of

Fontainebleau and Bentheimer
sandstones was investigated at ambient
are compared with computations on the
micro-CT images. For Bentheimer, which
contains image-resolvable clay regions,
ent confining pressures up to 10,000 psi.
Resistances were measured in 6- to 12-hr
increments, and values were recorded.
and reservoir pressures down to low the clay regions are considered as addi- Samples were flushed with 3 to 5 pore
water saturations. The RI measurements tional conductive pathways with differ- volumes of the saturating brine between
show that both sandstones display ent stress dependence. resistance measurements to ensure con-
Archie behavior at elevated pressure. sistent salinity over the experiment. The
However, at ambient pressure, the RI for Methodology resistance reading was considered stable
Fontainebleau sandstone deviates from Experimental Procedure. Rock. The when three subsequent measurements
Archie behavior at low water saturations. Fontainebleau sandstone samples used were within ±3% of each other. Resis-
The pore-space images suggest that exhibit relatively low porosity in the range tance measurements from the samples
the deviation from Archie behavior is of 4 to 5%, with sample permeabilities of were then converted to a resistivity value.
attributable to the presence of conductive approximately 0.03 to 2.2 md at confining
percolating grain-contact regions. pressures of 500 to 6,000 psi. The Ben- Calculation of Electrical Properties.
theimer sandstone samples used have a Electrical conductivity and RI are derived
Introduction porosity of approximately 23.7 to 25.9%, directly on the tomographic images by
Deviations from Archie’s law are known with permeability of the intact samples use of the voxel discretization naturally
to occur, particularly at low water satu- at approximately 2,000 md over a range provided by the tomograms. Each voxel is
rations, even for clean sandstones. It is of 500 to 6,000 psi in confining pressure. assigned a distinct resistivity according to
unclear whether the deviations from Ar- Fluid. RI and drainage capillary pres- its phase label, and the Laplace problem
chie behavior observed at low pressures sure experiments were performed with of electrical conductivity is solved with a
are also displayed at elevated pressures. brine (2% by weight sodium chloride) finite-element method implemented in
In this paper, the authors present labora- and air as the wetting and the non- parallel. For the samples used, the authors
tory measurements of RI for two strong- wetting phases, respectively. The den- selected the z-direction of the samples
ly water-wet sandstones at ambient and sity and viscosity of brine were mea- and applied a fixed potential of zero and
elevated pressures. The measurements sured to be 1.0166  g/cm3 and 1.0 cp, unity to inlet and outlet, respectively. Ef-
are supplemented with high-resolution while 0.00129  g/cm3 and 0.0185 cp fective resistivities result from a volume
microcomputed-tomography (CT) imag- were  used for the density and viscosity average over the resulting current field ac-
ing in dry and wet states at ambient pres- of air, respectively. cording to Ohm’s law. RIs are calculated by
sure to determine an accurate descrip- Core preparation, as well as image analy- solving twice, for the fully saturated sys-
tion of the open resolved pore space and sis and acquisition, is described in detail in tem and partially saturated system, and
to attribute a finite porosity to fluid- the complete paper. In Fig. 1, the authors deriving the conductivity or resistivity
saturated grain contacts at elevated pres- illustrate the final phase assignments for ratio. For Fontainebleau, it is known that
sure. Assuming that the main elements Fontainebleau sandstone, including grain/ the percolation behavior of grain contacts
responding to effective stress are the grain boundary labels for a few different at ambient conditions plays a critical role.
grain contacts, grain-contact conductiv- saturations and boundary assignments. Accordingly, the authors considered two
ities are estimated at elevated confining Laboratory Apparatus. The electrical- different grain/grain partitions and differ-
pressures with actual formation-factor resistivity measurements were per- ent grain-contact-conductivity scenarios,
measurements for saturated samples formed with equipment designed for both as follows:
at the same confining pressures. These drainage capillary pressure and differ- ◗ The aggressive segmentation in
Figs. 1a through 1c results in some
resolved porosity in grain contacts.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights
There are two compliant porosity
of paper SPE 181484, “Experimental and Numerical Investigations on Stress elements: grain/grain contact voxels
Dependence of Sandstone Electrical Properties and Deviations From Archie’s Law,” exhibiting nonresolved porosity and
by M.F. Farid, J.-Y. Arns, W.V. Pinczewski, and C.H. Arns, University of New South ones at which porosity is resolved
Wales, prepared for the 2016 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, but a different label is given. The
Dubai, 26–28 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed. authors differentiate grain-contact

For a limited time, the complete paper is free to SPE members at www.spe.org/jpt.

JPT • AUGUST 2017 51

 (a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f)

Fig. 1—Cross sections (top row is 840×840 voxels, bottom row is 800×800 voxels, alternate grain partition and
distinctive grain-contact labeling on the basis of a more-conservative segmentation) through phase distributions of
Fontainebleau sandstone forming the basis for resistivity and RI calculations at different water saturations. In 1a through
1c, red indicates nonwetting fluid, blue is water, and grain contacts are green. Water saturations: (a) 8%, (b) 32%,
(c) 61% for the case of all grain contacts conducting, and for different contact labeling. Water saturations for all grain
contacts conducting: (d) 12%, (e) 18%, (f) 37%.

conductivities for “grain contact”
and “resolved porosity” accordingly.
The resulting dependence of
porosity on confining pressure
matches the experimental data.
◗ A variation of the previous
scenario with significantly smaller
conductivities scaled to model
the experimental data while
maintaining a nonzero grain-
contact conductivity for all grain-
contact voxels.
◗ A best-guess segmentation and
grain partition with fewer grains
(Fig. 1d through 1f), setting
grain contact everywhere to a
corresponding grain-contact
thickness of 170 nm or doing so for
only a selection of the grain contacts
in a random manner.
For all cases and both sandstones, the
authors introduced a dependency of grain-
contact porosity on confining pressure
and for Bentheimer a clay-region porosity
dependence on confining pressure. It is
assumed that the effect of change in grain-
contact conductivity on effective conduc-
tivity of the samples is a first-order effect
and that, to a first-order approximation,
the geometry of the pore space stays and
the water distribution remains unchanged
with increasing pressure. The dependence
of porosity on confining pressure by con-
tact porosity alone was possible only for
the first previously described scenario and
not possible at all for Bentheimer sand-
stone because of the higher porosity and
associated smaller grain-contact area.
Experimental Results
Porosity. Both Bentheimer and Fon-
tainebleau samples display decreasing
porosity with increasing confining pres-
sure. The change of the porosity values
over the confining-pressure range was
approximately 1.2 times for Fontaine-
bleau and approximately 1.05 times for
Bentheimer. The difference is likely a
result of the higher porosity of the Ben-
theimer samples. In relative terms, the
significance of confining pressure for
Fontainebleau sandstone is much higher
than for Bentheimer. In absolute terms,
a reduction in porosity of approximate-
ly 1 porosity unit is seen for Bentheimer;
a reduction of 0.3–0.8 porosity units is
seen for Fontainebleau.
For both rocks in the first stage of con-
fining pressure up to 2,000 psi, the po-
rosity response is nonlinear, and then it
varies almost linearly to 6,000 psi. The
response of the Bentheimer and Fon-
tainebleau sandstones, therefore, is al-
most elastic, with a nonlinear behavior in
the early stage of the compression.
Electrical Properties. Electrical resis-
tivity was measured on six core plugs
of 1.5-in. diameter and four core plugs
of 1-in. diameter by use of the porous-
plate-desaturation technique. Electrode
spacing was 15.5 and 12 mm for the 1.5-
and 1-in. plugs, respectively. All data were
taken at 1.0 kHz.
(Continued on page 58)

52 JPT • AUGUST 2017

 Porosity/permeability crossplots for
carbonate reservoirs commonly show
large variability, demonstrating that fac-
tors other than porosity are important
in modeling permeability at the core-
plug scale. The complete paper discuss-
es different techniques that have been
used to include other influencing factors
besides porosity for the subsequent der-
ivation of permeability in carbonates.
Petrophysics
Rock-Typing Result
Apart from the deterministic rock typ-
ing, three different methodologies were
also implemented: multivariate clus-
ter analysis, cluster analysis, and self-
organizing maps. The methodologies
suggested seven to nine as the optimal
number of rock types. Ultimately, the
final rock-type methodology selected
Stress Dependence of Sandstone Electrical Properties and Deviations
From Archie’s Law (Continued from page 52)
Formation Factor. For the Ben-
theimer samples, the increase in forma-
tion factor was approximately 10%, and
it was up to 100% for Fontainebleau (up
to 200% for individual samples). A refer-
ence point of 500 psi was used as confin-
ing pressure for both rocks. The associ-
ated cementation exponent increased by
approximately 9% for the Fontainebleau
samples and by less than 1% for the Ben-
theimer samples across the whole pres-
sure range. The samples with lower po-
rosity display a higher formation factor
for both samples. The effect of the con-
fining pressure was higher on samples of
lower porosity.
RI. The RI data sets measured in this
study are in good agreement with pre-
viously reported measurements at am-
bient conditions for Fontainebleau and
Bentheimer sandstone over the pres-
sure and saturation ranges for which RI
was measured.
At 500-psi confining pressure, Ben-
theimer behaves as Archie rock. Fon-
tainebleau sandstone exhibits clear non-
Archie behavior at water saturations of
less than 20%. The present finding of
non-Archie behavior at ambient condi-
tions for Fontainebleau sandstone is con-
sistent with the literature.
At 6,000-psi confining pressure, Ben-
theimer sandstone remains an Archie
58
was that of the flow-zone indicator (FZI)
and the optimal number of rock types
selected was seven.
Results
The FZI/lithofacies relationship was test-
ed on other uncored wells. When both
lithofacies and FZI were tagged to all un-
cored wells within F field, it was observed
that MB-2/LB-1 showed high heterogene-
ity in terms of lithofacies laterally and
vertically. LB-2 is dominated by pack-
stones, while LB-3 consists of wacke-
stones with various quality.
MB-2 is quite homogeneous, with
wackestones dominating almost the entire
field. In some of the wells, a similar qual-
ity of wackestones can be observed verti-
cally, which indicates good connectivity.
LB-1 consists of packstones with inter-
mittent wackestones with various quali-
rock. Fontainebleau sandstone displays
Archie behavior to much lower water sat-
urations (less than 10%) than at low con-
fining pressure, where deviations start at
water saturations less than 15%. Devia-
tions from Archie behavior at low water
saturations expressed by a change of
slope are much weaker at high confining
pressure than at ambient conditions.
This study supports the finding of non-
Archie behavior at ambient conditions
for Fontainebleau sandstone reported
in previous studies. The authors con-
clude that the most likely explanation
of the disappearance or weakening of
non-Archie behavior of Fontainebleau at
high confining pressures is the closure or
partial closure of grain/grain contacts at
elevated confining pressures.
Numerical results for both rocks are de-
scribed in detail in the complete paper.
Conclusion
◗ RI measurements at different
confining pressures of clean,
strongly water-wet Bentheimer
rock samples display a typical
Archie behavior for water
saturations down to 10%.
◗ Clean strongly water-wet
Fontainebleau low-porosity
sandstone displays a negative
deviation of RI from Archie’s law at
ties. Part of this highly heterogeneous
reservoir unit is established by active de-
position, with signs of erosion toward the
western part of this field.
In LB-2, the packstone quality dete-
riorates significantly from the top to
the bottom of the reservoir unit. Al-
though LB-2 was identified as the best
reservoir unit for this field, the FZI/
lithofacies relationship showed that
even the best reservoirs can consist of
varying rock quality. This is clear evi-
dence of the highly heterogeneous con-
dition of this carbonate.
LB-3 is the most homogeneous res-
ervoir unit, dominated by wackestones
with similar qualities. However, the res-
ervoir quality deteriorates with depth.
All this information was translated
into a 3D geological model, as described
in the complete paper. JPT
ambient conditions because of the
presence of conductive percolating
grain-contact regions, which
are mainly closed at 6,000-psi
confining pressure, returning the
rock to Archie behavior by reducing
the saturation point at which
deviations from Archie’s law appear.
◗ Numerical simulations, including
those on very-low-porosity
Fontainebleau sandstone, can
depict the main behavior of the
experimental results by considering
the percolation behavior of
the grain-contact network for
Fontainebleau. Keeping all grain
contacts conducting in the
numerical approach does not
capture the qualitative behavior
seen in the experiment.
It is confirmed that the effect of
reservoir-stress conditions on grain con-
tacts leads to the observed waning of
non-Archie behavior toward high con-
fining pressure. The observed behavior
requires a distribution of grain/grain-
contact conductivities, with some grain
contacts becoming nonconductive. Such
variations in grain-contact conductivity
would be a natural consequence of local
stress conditions, where highly stressed
contact regions provide little to no con-
tribution to electrical conduction. JPT
JPT • AUGUST 2017